Repairing the world’s economic architecture and working with China is in America’s interest

Main image:&nbsp;

20151003_SRD005_0.jpg

THE DEBATE ABOUT America’s special role in the world economy and China’s troubled rise is haunted by the work of Charles Kindleberger, who studied the Depression of the 1930s. A lost decade of trade skirmishes, unemployment and devaluations eventually led to an arms race and a world war, the worst there had ever been. Kindleberger concluded that one country had to be in charge to keep the world safe in future. “The international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and the United States’ unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilising it…When every country turned to protect its national private interest, the world public interest went down the drain, and with it the private interests of all.”
Writing in 1973, Kindleberger worried that …